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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28117152">Can't Get Warm- Prompt Fill</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/captaincravatthecapricious/pseuds/captaincravatthecapricious'>captaincravatthecapricious</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anxiety, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Exhaustion, Fever, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Jon has more trouble with the Lonely than expected, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Negative Self Talk, Panic, Set in Episodes 159-160 | Scottish Safehouse Period (The Magnus Archives), Sickfic, post episode 159</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 23:28:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,133</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28117152</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/captaincravatthecapricious/pseuds/captaincravatthecapricious</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon is sick and cold and so used to being abandoned, how can he possibly believe that Martin will stay?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Martin Blackwood/ Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>195</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Can't Get Warm- Prompt Fill</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>cw panic, anxiety, negative self talk, guilt, Jon is having a really rough time, mental health issues, fever</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jon shivers under his hand as Martin traces the delicate bones protruding harshly from his narrow frame.  Jon is too warm under his hands.  He’s been since… likely before they got to the safe house, but Martin… wasn’t really himself at that point.  Should have been paying attention.  He should have done something more.  Let Jon get some sleep.  But instead, Martin may as well have been on the moon, and Jon drove over seven hours in the dark in a panic.  And Martin wasn’t even aware enough to hold his hand through it all.  <br/>Jon wrapped in a a quilt, quaking at the table last night.  Martin plying him with tea, and struggling through trying to make something warm and filling.  Something to put some life on his bones.  In his bones?  Come on.  He’s supposed to be good with words.  Guess it’s been a while.  <br/>They haven’t even managed to talk.  Jon feverish and chilled, Martin… still getting his feet under him.  He’s okay.  Or will be.  Probably.  Jon…. Jon though...  It’s not that his fever is particularly high.  As far as Martin can tell, it’s barely there.  Just enough to make Jon bleary and heavy headed.  Just a little dizzy when he moves.  But… but he can’t get warm.  Buzzing chills cutting through him.  Making his movements jerky and uncoordinated.  Causing him to stutter over a frozen tongue.  And Martin is worried.  <br/>It’s been a few days, and Martin is curled around Jon in the safe house bed.  Singular bed.  Martin tries not to be hurt that Jon usually tries to sleep at the very edge of the bed, making himself as small as he is able.  Jon has been through a lot.  Sometimes Jon has trouble with unexpected touch.  Not too often.  Jon having explained it as more of a cold non-human hands, and a trust thing.  And Martin is fairly certain that Jon doesn’t trust anyone at this point… except for Maybe him.  Maybe.  (And maybe Daisy, but she is possibly dead.  And if she isn’t…. Martin isn’t certain about that… He doesn’t understand that relationship in the slightest).  <br/>But Martin wakes up with Jon plastered to his side in the mornings.  So that counts for something.  He isn’t sure what… but something.  He feels a bit bad about it.  Jon is probably just gravitating towards warmth.  And Martin got that back …about a day after getting out of the Lonely.  Which is when he started to be able to tell Jon’s fever from what body heat actually feels like.  <br/>Jon is usually cold.  So Martin didn’t worry at first.  Always wrapped in a thick jumper back at the Institute.  Usually Martin’s this past year… what little Marin saw of him.  <br/>But here… he is shivering.  Constantly.  Even in front of a fire built from a stash of firewood they found under a tarp in a closet.  Even pressed against Martin’s furnace of a body.  Ceaseless shivering.  Exhausted.  Martin would blame it on the weather… but he just… can’t.  This isn’t Jon’s usual sick day standard.  This isn’t the classic: ‘Go Away I’m Fine.’  It isn’t the: ‘I Am Very Not Fine So I Have To Try Way Too Hard.’  It’s not the ‘I Am Out Of Energy So I am Being Blunt and Honest.’  And it isn’t the ‘I Am So Beyond Sick And Miserable That Either I am Unconscious Or Floppy Or I Will Quietly Glare Because I am Upset That My Body Has Betrayed Me.’  <br/>This is just… small and quiet.  <br/>Then again, Martin hasn’t been there.  Maybe this is some hellish new normal?  Has anyone cared when Jon has been sick?  When Jon was battling…. his…. addiction?  Hunger?  Martin doesn’t know!  There is so much he is missing!  And he wants to ask… but how do you start a conversation like that?  After missing so much….  After so much has changed.  <br/>Including himself.  He is colder.  He is broken… in a way.  But lined with steel in a way he hasn’t been… or at least, not visibly.  <br/>Martin tries to rub warmth into Jon’s skin, but Jon just shivers harder.  </p>
<p> </p>
<p>It’s late.  Or early.  Depending on how you look at it.  Jon is awake.  And cold.  Martin is sleeping deeply and so close to him.   But within those millimeters of warm air between them under the covers, there are tangles and spoils of words unsaid.  Vast and chilly spaces that Jon is more and more aware of the closer they are.  <br/>How long before Martin realizes that he’s wrong.  That he didn’t come back right.  That he isn’t worth the effort.  That he’s mean and awkward and needy and frail and a monster.   He isn’t human.  And he now actually has killed someone.  Someone who deserved it.  But... still someone.  <br/>Jon isn’t worth the baggage.  He knows it.  <br/>Everyone who ever met him knows it.  <br/>His Grandmother.  Georgie.  Tim.  Basira.  Now it’s just a matter of time before Martin figures it out. <br/>Just going to be left because what more could someThing like him possibly deserve.  He’ll just do what he has always done and suck up all the warmth he can, before he uses it all up and he has to wait years before he gets another scrap he doesn’t deserve.  <br/>Jon shivers.  And shivers.  And shivers.  He can’t quite see colors.  Not at this hour of darkness, but he knows his fingertips are the same chalky color of blue they have been since he walked into the Foresaken after Martin.  <br/>Martin leaving him or not, he doesn’t regret it.  Not for the world.  <br/>But he can’t let himself get used to the causal touches.  Those disappeared with Tim, and they will again.  Jon knows it, but he doesn’t know When.  And that is worse.  He would rather the end date be stamped into his skin.  Or circled in red on a calendar.  Nothing is worse than not knowing when the floor is going to fall out from under him again.  </p>
<p>His breathing is ragged.  And he feels sick.  And… ordinarily a panic in the night like this would lead to sticky sweat and clinging heat, but his internal temperature just plummets further and Christ how he wants to lean into Martin further, let himself be enveloped.  But he Can’t.  So he pulls himself from the bed harshly.  Shaking harder when the cold, autumn, night air bites at him.  Exacerbating the gooseflesh that has plagued him for days now.  <br/>He takes the dusty and itchy blanket from the couch and draws it tightly around his shoulders as he tears out the cabin’s front doors.  <br/>He has never been this cold in his life, but he seeks it out.  Anything to stop the anxious thoughts.  And the cold has always helped before.  He sits, rocking himself back and forth for an indeterminate amount of time, until he can almost taste dawn through the thick fog that blankets the countryside.  His shaking, blue fingers have lost all feeling and the blanket slides down around his waist.  It had done nothing to stave off the chills that course through him.  Less than nothing.  It made Martin’s absence all the more tangible.  <br/>Only in the next room, and he was a world away.  And Jon could never have him.  Not just the tasted of the Loved-past-tense, but the certainly that he had never been able to keep one good thing in his life, and Martin was by far the best.  The best he could ever have and he was just as doomed to lose.  </p>
<p>Martin finds him not long after that.  <br/>Martin is bleary from interrupted dreams of fog and the panic of finding the bed empty of his still so sick and cold and small Jon.  <br/>He searched the house with increasing panic, only to find Jon sitting in a close fog, shaking harder than ever.  He rocks back and forth, knees drawn to his chest.  So small.  So so so small.  <br/>“Oh Jon.”<br/>Jon doesn’t even look up.  Just stares blankly ahead as Martin sits down next to him.  <br/>“I’m going to pull the blanket over you, alright?”  Martin waits.  He gets the faintest and shakiest of nods before he draws the blanket around Jon’s shaking shoulders.  He is worried that it doesn’t even bring him the smallest of reactions.  <br/>“Jon-love?”<br/>That breaks Jon.  Just a little.  A fraction of a hairline crack that splits his narrow frame in two over the course of a few seconds.  Freezing tears down his overly warm face.  <br/>“Martin…. I… I…can’t do this.  How long can you stand me?  How long before you realize… I’m… there’s a reason I…. I’m not good.  I’m not good and it’s… it’s just a matter of time before you realize that I… I’m not human and I’m not good and I’m…. I’m not worth it.  How many days can you put up with me.  And I’ve trapped you…. here.  And I shouldn’t be…I shouldn’t have thought….  I…. Just… leave me.  I just should have …. if I hadn’t have woken up….  If I had just died when Prentiss…. It should have been me when I was eight and you could have grown up in a world without Jonathan Sims and No one would have died and I wouldn’t be… a  m-monster.  And you wouldn’t be stuck in the middle of nowhere with me…  Your horrible boss.  And you… And I wouldn’t have to wait for you to realize how worthless and pathetic and ….I’m not with your time… and you should know it before I ruin you even further….  I…”<br/>He chokes on a sob.  A silent sob.  And Martin wonders how many nights he has missed just like this since Jon woke up.  How many nights that they have spent side by side.  Every night?  Is this the first time.  And how long has this been inside of Jon.  <br/>Martin slowly, envelopes Jon in a hug.  Moving slowly enough that Jon can absolutely see what is happening and can stop him with even the slightest of movements.  But he doesn’t.  And he’s freezing in Martin’s arms.  Freezing.  Aside from a burning forehead.  <br/>And Martin… Martin wonders what exactly this is.  Because this rolling fog is thick and smells of salt and… it isn’t here for him.  <br/>“Jon…. I’m not going anywhere.  You are Not a monster.  We are going to figure this out.  I swear to you, Jon.  I swear it.  We are going to figure this out… together and I am going to be with you every step of this miserable way.  I love you.  Jon, I love you so much and You are worth it.  I am not stuck here with you.  I… I should have been with you so much sooner.  And I need to thank you, because without you… I wouldn’t be here.  And I am so, so, so glad I know you and that I met you.  And honestly… I wouldn’t trade you for anything.  Now please Jon… let me get you inside…. I need to try to get you warm…. I… I’m really worried.  You’re scaring me a bit.  Not… not because you’re a monster.  You aren’t!  I’m scared because you are hurting and I don’t know how to help.  You’ve… been treated horribly and you didn’t deserve that.  Please… let me have a chance to make it up to you?”  <br/>Jon sobs harder.  Silent sobs.  Gasping for air.  But he grabs onto Martin’s protective arms around him.  And Martin thinks he can feel a little more warmth and a little less fog around his… partner?  Is it official after half a love confession.  God he wishes he could call up someone and ask ‘hey is it gay to comfort the love of your life in the middle of an eldritch fog?’  <br/>Martin scoops up Jon, quaking in his arms and sets him in front of the fire place.  He drapes him in every blanket in the safe house and wraps Jon tightly in them, handing him a roll of bath tissue and pressing gentle kisses to the crown of his head as he sets about getting tea and a fire going.  Once that is done, he takes Jon, blankets and all, into his lap, holding him gently and rocking him softly until Jon starts to warm up… just a little.  The blue in his fingers starting to retreat.  His face still fever-flushed and puffy from crying, but less tense as the shivers cleaving him started to retreat into more normal fever chills.  <br/>Jon sniffs up at him through salt damp lashes and puffy lids, “Are you going to leave me?”<br/>Martin’s heart breaks again.  “No.  Never.”  And he presses kiss after kiss along Jon’s forehead until Jon relaxes into a fitful, but thawing slumber.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If you liked this, please drop me a comment, and come find me on tumblr!  I am captaincravatthecapricious there as well and if you find the bingo prompt meme and want to see me create some more let me know a character, which prompt you want, and whether you want a fic or a drawing!  Have an excellent day!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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